There Are 70,000 Apps On The New BlackBerry, But Not The Apps You Want

When BlackBerry announced its new phones this week, it spent a
good part of the presentation touting the app selection it'll
have at launch.

It needed to.

No matter how good the new BlackBerry 10 operating system may be
–– and early
reviews are very positive –– the new BlackBerrys are
worthless without a robust app selection. And that doesn't just
mean the number of apps available. (BB10 has about 70,000 apps
available at the moment). It means BB10 needs the popular apps
people actually use and care about.

At Wednesday's BB10 launch event, the company addressed the issue
head on. Martyn Mallick, BlackBerry's VP of global alliances and
business development, took the stage and (with a lot of forced
enthusiasm) began rattling off a bunch of apps that will be on
BB10.

Skype! Amazon Kindle! WhatsApp! Angry Birds!

But with the exception of Angry Birds, none of those are on BB10
yet, and there's no word on when they'll actually launch. Just
because a developer is "committed" to BB10, doesn't mean it
intends to start cranking right away. If you end up buying one of
the new BlackBerrys, don't hold your breath waiting for these
apps to arrive.

What's even more important: the popular apps that Mallick didn't
mention. There's no Instagram. No Yelp. No Spotify. No Pandora,
Gmail, or Evernote. The list goes on and on, but you probably get
the idea by now. And there's no guarantee any of those
apps will every come to BB10.

So what does BlackBerry's App World have? If you take a
look at the top trending or featured apps, it's a sad collection
of knockoffs and other junk. There's Apollo, an app that
supposedly lets you stream Pandora music. There's an
app called Tiny Bird, which is a blatant ripoff of the
insanely popular iPhone app Tiny Wings. The number one photo app
is an Instagram clone called PicStory. The list goes on.

Then there are the big-name apps that BlackBerry was forced to go
it alone and make itself. The Facebook app that ships with BB10
isn't made by Facebook, it's made by RIM. Same goes for Dropbox,
Google Talk, and Yahoo Messenger.

That means big companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Google, and a
slew of others only take BB10 seriously enough to allow RIM to
make apps for them. That also means when those companies release
new features for their apps, BB10 users will have to wait for
BlackBerry to catch up and add them too. Not a good sign.

Despite RIM's best efforts at courting developers, it's clear
many, if not most of the important ones don't think BB10 is worth
their time.

Will BB10 app selection grow over time?

Yes.

Will some big name apps eventually make it to BB10?

Of course.

The problem is, BlackBerry is very late to the game launching an
operating system that's just as good as iPhone and Android.
There's little incentive for developers to care about BB10, which
means there's little incentive for you to care about using it if
you care about apps.